Peter Cooper On Music: Bela Fleck buttons up for premiere of banjo concerto

Bela Fleck is a masterful musician, an extraordinary and fearless player with three big gigs coming up.

“I’m petrified,” he says.

Petrified? No way. Fleck plays the banjo naturally, like a fish swimming, a bird flying or former Vols basketball coach Bruce Pearl breaking an NCAA regulation. He plays bluegrass, world music, jazz, folk, pop and rock.

With his Flecktones band, he plays a mash-up of all those things, with intricate time signature shifts that’ll trip you up if you’re trying to stand and tap your feet while listening.

Fleck is at home on a stage holding a banjo in his hands the way you’re at home in your home, holding a TV remote or a chicken wing or an autographed picture of actress Jan Smithers, who played Bailey Quarters on WKRP in Cincinnati.

So, like, really at home.

“Petrified,” Fleck repeats, assessing his three upcoming performances, set for Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. “This one is scary. Usually, I stay very chill onstage and have a great time. This is different.”

“This” is a performance with the Grammy-grabbing Nashville Symphony Orchestra, and the performance is of Fleck’s Concerto for Banjo, the first major classical piece composed specifically for the banjo.

Uniquely Nashville

The notion of making a banjo interact and play nice with strings and woodwinds isn’t what frightens Fleck. What sets his teeth to chattering is the realization that the symphonic collaboration removes any chance for improvisation. He’ll have to play it exactly the way he wrote it. He’ll have to play it all from memory, not from mood or instinct.

Ever try to compose and memorize an entire concerto? It’ll scare you, like the moment you realized I somehow knew all about your Bailey Quarters fixation. (Hint: We put tiny cameras inside the newspaper so we can better understand readership demographics. You look nice today.)

“This has taken years of work,” said Giancarlo Guerrero, the symphony’s much-lauded musical director. “First, you’re asking the artist to write something for a full symphony orchestra: a daunting task even for professional composers.

And this is more than just a piece commissioned by the Nashville Symphony. This is being written specifically for the players of the Nashville Symphony. Bela spent time meeting with our principle players, getting to know how the clarinet works, how string players bow their instruments. It’s remarkable to me, what he’s been able to do.”

In other symphony cities, such a collaboration would never occur. When symphonies bring in guests from other musical fields, it’s usually to put on a “pops concert,” and a pops concert is most often a dumbed-down, low-level affair: classical music for people who don’t like classical music.

Fleck’s concerto, though, is a first-of-its-kind endeavor, one that involves the banjo, an instrument that lands at No. 428, between foghorn and kazoo, on the list of things that are appropriate to play in a symphony setting. Symphony hall security agents are trained to check for banjos the way T.S.A. agents are trained to check for dangerous items, like 3.5 ounces of mouthwash.

But Fleck has already performed with the Nashville Symphony, on a memorable evening with his genius-grant-winning pal, bassist Edgar Meyer. And when considering a commission, Guerrero and Nashville Symphony President and CEO Alan Valentine are more concerned with the quality of the musician/composer than with the supposed limitations of a particular instrument.

They’re also devoted to delivering programs that emphasize the connectivity between the orchestra and the entirety of Nashville’s musical community. That connectivity is apparent each time the symphony collaborates with folks like Fleck, Meyer or, as happened earlier this month, pop songwriter K.S. Rhoads, and the result is some of the nation’s most distinctive symphony programming.

“When I came to Nashville, it was immediately apparent that I had at my disposal an amazing resource of musicians,” Guerrero says. “This is a blessed town when it comes to the level of artists and musicians, and we’re all part of the same musical environment.”

All shook up

When not hyperventilating about all the memorization, Fleck ponders how well his banjo fits in with the symphony. Quite well, he thinks. The banjo has a sound unlike anything else in the orchestra.

It is at once melodic and percussive, and it’s loud enough that Fleck may not even need a separate microphone. Fleck has been obsessed with the banjo since he was a boy in New York, watching television.

“The Beverly Hillbillies came on, and I was just shaken to the core by the sound of Earl Scruggs’ banjo,” says Fleck, who is dedicating his concerto to Scruggs.

“I had no connection to the South, to bluegrass or to folk music, but that sound just changed me. Earl has been an innovator in so many ways, and he took the banjo to where it became a major musical instrument in the world. So many people’s first exposure to the banjo was hearing Earl Scruggs, and so many people in Nashville wouldn’t be here making music if Earl hadn’t picked up a banjo as a kid in North Carolina. When they heard him playing, it flipped them out and shook them up. That’s what it did for me.”

Fleck remains flipped out and shaken up. Also, petrified. Later this week, he, Guerrero and the symphony will get together and do something that’s never been done before.

“When you have someone of Bela’s artistry, there are no risks involved,” Guerrero says. “In the end, it’s Bela’s playing that is going to be showcased. The orchestra should be a partner and a companion, but this is for Bela to showcase his unbelievable virtuosity and to demonstrate what the capabilities of this instrument are.”